


I Woke Up and One of Us Was Crying

by Luna



Category: Limetown (Podcast)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Mid-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-17
Updated: 2016-12-17
Packaged: 2018-09-09 03:21:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8873767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Luna/pseuds/Luna
Summary: She always assumed the ringing in her ears was merely something Limetown left her with, another invisible scar. Noise without signal. She never thought--never wanted to think--that it was Max, half a world and ten long years away.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Melody_Jade](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Melody_Jade/gifts).



Not everything in the world has changed. Deirdre still takes her coffee black, does crosswords with a pen, prefers ivy to roses and Kirk to Picard. These tiny facts are fixed in place, like stars she could use to navigate at night. If the sky wasn't polluted by light and smoke. If she dared to look up.

She stands under the shower with her eyes closed. The water is blessedly hot, for once, stinging her skin, melting away her Ambien hangover. Her soap smells like coconuts and she wonders if she could get a good pina colada around here, and whether it's going to be another hot day. Simple questions like that.

Then she realizes her ears have stopped ringing.

It was never in her ears, of course. It was in her brain, buried deep, neurons twitching and sparking in search of a lost stimulus. The damage was permanent, an echo she could never shake. 

And now it's gone. She turns the shower off to be certain, holding her breath. The drain is rumbling and her hair is dripping, but all she hears is silence. It's beautiful.

She manages to go on about the morning without letting herself ask why. She combs her hair and puts on a dress, and lipstick, because otherwise she looks faded, older than her age. On her way out the door, she only checks the deadbolt three times.

Down on the street it's warm in the sunlight, ten degrees cooler in the shade. She walks up the boulevard, keeping pace with strangers heading to work. It's always important to seem like you have somewhere else to be. She buys a sack of chestnuts from a pushcart and eats them as she walks, leaving flecks of their skins behind like Hansel and Gretel's breadcrumbs. A story about finding your way home--she shoves the thought away. Concentrates on the taste of the chestnuts, rich and dark and sweet, the way things are when they're almost burned.

Mopeds blast through impossibly narrow gaps in traffic. Cars honk in impotent rage. Metal grates scrape open in front of the stores as their lights come on. Sirens, radios, voices colliding in the air. Deirdre window-shops until the noise subsides, the morning rush settling into the rhythms of any ordinary day.

On autopilot, she ducks into her favorite cafe. Favorite's a strong word: the coffee tastes like rotten sweatsocks, and the music they play is strictly Eurovision. But it was the first place in this city where she could sit still, read a newspaper, and take her eyes off the door long enough to turn the page. Somehow that's turned into ten years of loyalty. 

She's sitting in the window, sugaring her tea, enjoying the way that the sunlight fights with the A/C so that she can lean one way into chills and the other into summer. Balanced in between, it's just--Max is gone.

It's not a thought or a feeling. It's knowledge, sliding into her like a knife between the ribs. She shoves her chair back from the table, bolts to the tiny bathroom and locks herself inside. Max is gone, Max is dead. The knife twists. 

She grips the edge of the sink, sure she's going to be sick, bleach fumes burning her eyes. Tears. Then sobbing, so intense it doubles her over, her whole body crumpled in this fist of grief. She always assumed the ringing in her ears was merely something Limetown left her with, another invisible scar. Noise without signal. She never thought--never wanted to think--that it was Max, half a world and ten long years away.

Maybe she should have let them cut it out of her, just rip it out of her head, whatever the price.

In time the sobbing subsides into ordinary crying. Deirdre breathes, blows her nose into a rough paper towel. She goes through the café, past the staring barista and out to the street. It's hotter now, with the full weight of noon bearing down. The sun glares off the empty sidewalks and makes the edges of her vision pulse red. She tries not to look over her shoulder.

She retraces her steps like a mechanized toy, takes the stairs up to her apartment two at a time. Bolts the door, closes the curtains. Gets out the pack of cigarettes she's kept at the back of the freezer since the last time she quit for good. Her hands are trembling enough that she wastes two matches before she can strike a flame. She leans against the counter, smoking, the silence building up and up inside her.

It's not fair. This is just not fair. She's grieved for Max enough. She's missed him for so long: since before the Panic, the implant, since the day they moved to Tennessee, maybe even longer. There's nothing left to cry about.

If he was here, he'd laugh at her. _Be rational,_ he'd say. _Don't assume. Facts, let's deal with facts and not your wishy-washy humanities-major intuition--_

She stubs her cigarette out in the sink. Scatters the ashes.

The truth is, he's right. Would be right. Intuition is worthless without proof. She gets a bottle of water from the fridge, holds it to her forehead and eyelids until she's good and numb. Then she takes a sip, and lights another smoke. Time to prove it.

She sits in the middle of her bed, supplies laid out around her in a protective circle. Water, ashtray, lighter, laptop tethered to the phone, scratch paper, three different pens. TV on with the volume low, for white noise. Everything she needs to start digging down to the facts. Research is comforting, carved in her muscle memory. Once upon a time this was her life. She'd go for days, slamming Diet Coke and instant noodles, never coming up for air until she had answered some question, beyond the shadow of a doubt or a hope.

It doesn't take days. It barely takes hours. There's sunlight angling in between her curtains when his name turns up in a tweet. Then a headline, a story.

Deirdre's fingers jerk away from the keyboard. She reads slowly, as if she barely knows the language, individual words catching at her like thorns.

Finlayson. Infamous. Disappearance. Self-inflicted. Gunshot. Police said.

Limetown.

She startles herself with a hiccup of laughter. Part of this, at least, is a mistake, or a trick. Max would never be able to commit suicide. An ego like that cannot extinguish itself.

The description of the Panic is brief and brutally inaccurate. A single reference to Finlayson's wife among the missing. Ex-wife, Deirdre thinks, tensing. Ex-wife, and she has a name. Then she has to remind herself how glad she is, how grateful, to be outside of the story.

Further down, as if this wasn't surreal enough already, there's a comments section. Comments on Max's obituary. He would hate that so much, he'd come around to loving it out of sheer contrarian spite. _Howler monkeys gotta howl,_ he'd say. She isn't planning to dignify it with so much as a glance, but the very first comment flares out at her--

_Bullshit. We've all heard the 911 call. He talked and they got him, how many times does it have to happen?_

\--and she knows what a deer must feel when the headlights flood her retinas and white out the rest of the world.

She's frozen, she doesn't know how long, but while she stares the page reloads itself, goes blank and reappears, and the comment vanishes before her eyes. 

People always have conspiracy theories, always second gunmen and black helicopters, shadow governments and lizard people to blame for human folly. You ignore the ideas, and they go away. But this one is already gone--nothing to see here, move along--and so she can't ignore it, or choose not to know.

If this is a message, it's the same one Deirdre got along with her new passport and contact lenses and Swiss bank account: Don't breathe a word. They're watching her, waiting for her to fall.

What happens next happens smoothly, without trying, or thinking. She's rehearsed this in her mind so many times that now it's like watching herself in a movie. Grab the packed suitcase out from under the bed. Put on the jacket with the money sewn into the lining. Walk to the Metro--walk, don't run--and catch an inbound train.

It's already rush hour again, standing room only on the train. She plants her feet and hangs on to the handle of her suitcase, her grip white-knuckle tight. Strangers bump into her, step on her feet and cough at her back. They ought to make her claustrophobic, but instead they're sort of comforting, a buffer. If anything was true in that article, they were very sure that Max was alone.

Every time she blinks, she pictures it more clearly, like an image surfacing from a blurry Polaroid. Max's face, roughed up, bleeding from one ear, maybe, crazed hair and wild eyes. Scared, but more than scared. He's fascinated. Inspired.

He would have died with that spark in his eyes, still thinking, _I know something you don't know_ , and the worst part is, the bastard, he almost always did.

She bites the inside of her cheek, focuses on feeling only that small, precise pain.

Coming into the old city, she's surprised by how beautiful everything is. This late in the afternoon, the upper storeys of the buildings are still blazing in the sun, but the plaza is a pool of blue shadows. A whiff of lake water on the breeze. It's funny to realize that there are things here she'll miss, almost as much as home. 

She crosses the plaza, watching her step on the cobblestones, the suitcase dragging behind her like a stubborn dog. She'd thought about losing her wallet along the way, letting someone scavenge it and muddy the waters. But this would be the one time in a hundred that some good Samaritan would pick it up and call after her, even follow her. And she won't let anyone get pulled into her wake. 

The parking garage is only a mile away, but it feels like she's been walking for hours, a watery feeling in her knees. She walks up the exit ramp and takes a wrong turn inside. For seven horrible seconds of freefall she's sure that her car is gone, that she's already too late.

But there's the Lada, boxy shape blurred by layers of dust. Twenty-five years ago, it was the pride of the Eastern Bloc. She bought it last summer for a couple hundred dollars, cash on the nail, and barely drove it at all before stashing it here. Dirt comes off on her hand when she opens the door, like she's been fingerprinted. She has this strange flash of fear that it won't wash away.

The key rattles between her fingers and the ignition. This is her movie, driving fast, staying low. She'll throw the wallet away somewhere on the road, and the sim card from her phone. Let it fly out the window, be across the border before it hits the ground. 

Her hand twists, the key turns, the engine coughs, and--nothing.

She does it again.

Silence.

She keeps trying, over and over, panic spiking through her like a fever, all hot shivers and cold sweat. Her mouth tastes of metal, of blood, and if Max was here with her she'd spit in his face. She'd shove everything she has to feel now into his head. Make him look, really look at what he's done to her, what they did together.

When she woke up from the operation, too sore and drugged to speak, the first thing her gaze fixed on was Max's hand resting on hers. Their fingers were laced together in spite of all the needles and tubes. He didn't look at her until she moved her thumb. His eyes were bloodshot, sleepless, searching for something. And he must have found it, because he smiled, and a bell rang inside her, the clear tone of what she would come to learn was relief, was joy.

 _Oh,_ she tried to say, and he brightened. She didn't have to say, _I can hear you._

Max knew. And Max never left her.

This is the lightning bolt, the eighteen-wheeler behind the headlights, finally crashing into her. She could always hear him, all this time, even when she wasn't listening. The ringing in her ears was Max, calling her or thinking of her or simply knowing her, down to the last cell in her body. Put a continent and an ocean between them, and she was still close enough to feel his death.

No tears now, just this ache, sand in her eyes, a stone in her throat. Max knew the tech better than anyone--god, anyone left alive. He would have held this secret very dear. He'd made a bond no one could break, so much more powerful than the people who tried to control it, or own it, or take it away.

He talked, and they got him. 

After so long--why--

She throws down the useless key and fumbles for her phone. Blank screen, blind. She gets out of the car, leaves her life in it without so much as locking the door. Up, up, her running steps echoing off the concrete, up to the roof level and open air. As soon as her phone finds a signal she starts searching, again, for his name. 

This is something conspiracy theorists never learn: finding out a secret is the easy part. The hard part is deciding that you want to know, no matter what it takes. 

She knows all she needs to know when she sees the reporter's name. 

Lia Haddock. She thinks of a little girl, shy but bright, too bright for her own good. But of course Lia would have grown up, and of course Max would talk to her. He'd want to show off what he knew. He'd want his version of the story to be taken as gospel. He'd believe that she came to him to understand. To see his vision.

Deirdre tried. Another picture that she's failed to forget: lying on the floor of the Stanford house, and it felt like the last day of their lives. She was staring over at the walls she'd been asking him to paint, thinking how much she hated that shade of yellow, how she couldn't keep living here after he left. And then Max raised himself up on his elbows and looked at her, into and through her at the same time. _I'm going to change the world,_ he said, and it was like the sun was rising on a horizon that she couldn't see. She had to trust that it was there because of the reflected light in his eyes. 

Now she thinks that was the last free choice either of them ever made. 

Until Lia Haddock called, and Max decided to answer. He stopped running.

Deirdre walks to the edge of the roof. The view from here runs all the way to the lakefront, wires and spires and minarets giving way to the blue haze of the mountains. If someone looked up right now, they would see her silhouetted clearly against the reddening sky. 

Whatever Max said, it wasn't a confession. In the first place, he never felt guilty enough. And he left Deirdre out of the story, he must have, or somebody would have killed her by now. He tried, however foolishly, to protect her. To buy her time. 

She's supposed to keep her head down. She's supposed to keep running, but as long as she does, she'll always be in Limetown.

She closes her eyes, catches her breath. Max's voice comes to her so plainly that she doesn't know if it's imagination or memory or something more, something technically impossible. Max would say, silence is made to be broken. 

And even though she is still furious with him, still shaking with adrenaline, she feels calm, the edge of calm, like she's dipping her toes in the cool shallows of a deep lake. It reminds her of Emil Haddock, of that perfect stillness in the center of the panic she started, the fire she lit. But calm isn't the absence of danger or fear. Calm is a choice. 

She angles the phone close to her chest so that it glows in her shadow. Reads the screen again, carefully. Touches the hotline number like a signature on a love letter. 

She is standing perfectly still, listening to it ring. Whoever's watching, she thinks, watch this.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Elvis Costello's "I Want You." Beta notes tk. Happy Yuletide!


End file.
